The title of the exhibition, Painter’s Forms, references Philip Guston’s 1972 oil painting of the same title, a painting created during Guston’s departure into figurative abstraction that pulls its imagery from materials in and around the studio. Using the materials of painting and painting itself as a subject, Rogers fluidly interlaces painting with photography and film. In his new body of work, painted forms and materials are utilized as backdrops for his photographs and films, and spatial effects captured in his photographs and films are mined as imagery for his paintings.

Rogers’ paintings are first composed with a fixed constant, two lines drawn from corner to corner of the painting. The “X” delineating the painting as subject, its edges and boundaries defined at first glance. Then the notations of painting emerge, large washes of vibrating color influenced by materials in the studio, breaks in patterns and shapes from masked lines, and painterly textures from thick to thin applied with brushes and palette knives. These loose shapes and hard geometric abstractions directly reference and are subjects in Rogers’ photographs and films.

The photographs in the exhibition are composed as a posthumous collaboration of sorts. Rogers’ own burlap and canvas paintings serve as backdrop to maquette sculptures made by the artist’s grandfather. These are photographed on a mirrored ground so that all forms flatten out and take on the same patterning and abstraction depicted in his paintings. These silver gelatin prints are then presented in polished aluminum frames further reflecting the mirrored image, and doubling the effect of the photograph as material, image, and referent.

Also included, as a kind of lexicon to the exhibition, are two more key works. First, his own Painter’s Forms, a color photograph of the materials and forms used as imagery across all media in the exhibition. And finally, a 16mm film where these forms are strung into a mobile and lit so that the composition of each frame changes as the film traces the mobile’s movement.